


Shadow Weaver's Storytime

by Shadsie



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora and Catra as kids, Bright Moon, Campfire stories, Corpses, Decapitation, Execution, Expansion on Canon, Gen, Ghost Stories, Horde kids, Horde propaganda, Horror, It's Shadow Weaver telling them though, Kidfic, Past setting, References to Frankenstein, References to the Headless Horseman, S2 Episode 3, The Headless Princess, The Kingdom of Dryl, The Kingdom of Snows, The Undead Princess, The Weeping Princess, The ghost stories from "Signals", Unsure on rating -violence but in the vein of campfire ghost stories, plumeria - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2020-06-09 21:39:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19484545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: Shadow Weaver takes the latest batch of orphans that she is training to become Horde-soldiers out on a field survival exercise - a camping trip, if you will.  To drive home the future dangers they will be facing (and to instill an appropriate fear and loathing of Princesses in them), she tells them campfire-tales.





	1. At the Campfire

**Author's Note:**

> Planning on making this a relatively short fic, with concise little chapters. Listed as a probable 5-chapter fic including this as a setup, the three stories based upon Adora's stories in "Signals," then a cap-off chapter. 
> 
> Unsure of rating. Some of the stories have grisly parts, but I did not wish to rate this a "teen" due to this being campfire-horror stories for kids in a similar vein to "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" - which I grew up with without significant trauma. Some of those things, like many horror stories that are supposed to be for children are actually pretty gnarly. And this is Shadow Weaver who is telling the tales...you should know what to expect. In other words, be warned. Your mileage may vary. 
> 
> Just a tale of Horde-kids being treated to and frightened by gruesome tales of Princesses who cannot rest in death.

**Shadow Weaver’s Storytime**   
  
  
  
**Chapter 1: At the Campfire**  
  
  
Yellow-green flames flickered, painting the faces of the children in a peridot-pallor. Adora sat on her bedroll, balling up its edges in her tiny hands. Catra was stretched out on her own bedroll beside hers. The night would probably end with them cuddled up together against the cold as it usually did on these outdoor trips. Most of the kids ended up in piles and tangles with each other, but Catra only tolerated being close to her. The other children in their squadron sat or lounged at various points, circular around the campfire and under the glaring supervision of Shadow Weaver who sat on large flat rock.   
  
The group was out for a training exercise: Survival in the field. They’d been in pairs all day hunting up grubs, scraps and drinkable water around the wilds of the Fright Zone. They were, in fact, pretty far out – farther out than Shadow Weaver had ever taken them on previous excursions. The dreaded Whispering Woods were in sight, its trees looming black against the lingering yellow haze of the Fright Zone’s semi-illuminated air.   
  
Lonnie looked at those ominous silhouettes. “Miss Shadow Weaver? Are you ever going to take us into the woods? I mean, if we’re supposed to be learning to survive between the Rebellion’s lines…that’s their territory.”   
  
“Someday,” Shadow Weaver intoned, “When you have proven your worth. Right now, it would lead to needless losses. Lord Hordak would be displeased.”   
  
Catra stretched and yawned. “He hasn’t even met us! It’s not like he cares! We’ll survive! We can totally impress him with recon-work!”   
  
“Yeah, I wanna see what the woods are like!” Adora chimed. “They look soooo spooky!”   
  
“Children!” Shadow Weaver hissed. “Know your place. And your time. The woods are the domain of the Princesses and do you have any idea what they’ll do to you once they take you?”   
  
“They’ll…eat us?” Kyle asked.   
  
“Worse,” Shadow Weaver said with something that sounded like a grin behind her mask. “Much, much worse.”   
  
“It’s nighttime. Don’t they attack during the day?” Adora asked innocently.   
  
“I think that it is time for some very important stories,” Shadow Weaver replied. “They should serve to educate you.”   
  
“Bedtime stories? That’s what the nanny-bot told us when we were babies!” Catra complained.   
  
“Oh, these are very special stories,” Shadow Weaver insisted. “You are old enough to know of them now. To know why some of our best soldiers have a habit of…disappearing. Why entire towns vanish in the course of a night!”   
  
“Oooh!” Adora gasped along with her squad-mates, almost as one.  
  
“It is time you learn about the Ghost Princesses,” Shadow Weaver said, penting her hands. She motioned with them, waving smoke from the campfire into her palms and weaving it into vague shapes: Dancing people -The shape of a rider on a rearing beast - A slumped over woman - before dissipating it all into nothingness.   
  
“Ghosts? Aren’t they a myth?” Lonnie groused. “Only babies believe in ghosts!!  
  
Shadow Weaver gave her a condescending nod. “As a sorceress, I know of magical beings and their ways. When a Hordesman dies – honorably in battle, of course – they take their rest. Normally, that which is dead stays dead. However, it is different with Princesses….and…their victims!”   
  
She’d said “victims!” with a start, causing all of the children to startle. She had their rapt attention now.   
  
“I’m not afraid of ghosts!” Catra proclaimed, “Or Princesses!”   
  
“You should be.”   
  
The sorceress gesticulated with her fingers in the air, drawing magic, dark in color, into various images like a shadow-puppet-play.   
  
“Now,” she said, her voice calm but as black as the settling evening, “Which of the great tales should I tell you first?” 


	2. The Undead Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Frankenstein story for Etherian youth. 
> 
> Warning: Somewhat grisly and mentions of animal abuse.

**Shadow Weaver’s Storytime**  
  
  
  
**Chapter 2: The Undead Princess**  
  
  
Lightning broke upon the top of a dark tower. The magical miniature scene woven between Shadow Weaver’s skilled fingers painted images of gloom as she spoke deep and dark.   
  
“Long before the Horde came to this world to grant order, the many kingdoms of Etheria were shrouded in chaos, each – as to this day in the un-liberated areas – filled with terrified people ruled over by ferocious monarchies. Hundreds of years ago, no royals were more horrible than the members of the House Vesselak of Dryl.”   
  
The sorceress spun shadow and light for her charges, panning the scene to the inside of the tower. Two people were dancing a waltz. All around them were various strange items; alchemical tables covered with glass vials and glowing stones, mechanical apparatuses and strange animals making noise from cages.  
  
Kyle shrank back from a monkey-like creature with large bat-ears screeching in the vision. Shadow Weaver turned to him and shifted the scene to a pair of ordinary rabbits in a cage above it.   
  
“King Oppenheimer and Princess Marie were quite cruel,” she intoned. “They loved each other more than any two people could love, but outside of each other and their child, they had no affection. Both of them were overcome with an insatiable curiosity. They were scientists and mages, but not like the doctors who give you your vitamin boosters here in the Horde or the personnel that maintain our machines. They were not even like your dear sweet Auntie Shadow Weaver…”  
  
Adora watched Catra’s eyes narrow. She nudged her friend, cautioning her not to get caught making that kind of a glare at their caretaker.   
  
“The scene she’s setting looks an awful lot like her alchemy-room,” Catra whispered.  
  
“Keep it down!” Adora shushed. “Do you know what she’ll do to you if she knows you’ve been in there?”  
  
“Probably things like the people in her story are doing,” she replied. She looked warily up at Shadow Weaver, who was fully distracted with making Rogelio flinch and gaining Lonnie’s attention.   
  
“Their progress was paved with the tears of rabbits… and of peasants,” Shadow Weaver told.   
  
“Um…Miss Shadow Weaver?” Adora asked, raising a hand, “If Oppenheimer was a king, why was his wife a princess? Shouldn’t she have been a queen?”   
  
“As we all know,” Shadow Weaver explained, “Princess’ is a term for those born with magical power – those that did not earn it like proper sorcerers and they are, by nature, unstable beings. They sometimes take the title of ‘Queen’ upon reaching age forty, but rarely before. In truth, a Princess can take on any title she pleases – ‘Empress,’ ‘Lady,’ ‘Maven,’ – even masculine titles of ‘Lord’ or ‘Overlord’ if they so wish. King Oppenheimer had reached the age in which he no longer called himself a ‘Prince,’ but ‘King.” Princess Maria was a few years younger than he when this story begins, although, as you shall witness, there came a time when age did not apply to her.”   
  
She wove the scene further. A little purple-haired girl stepped into the room where the king and his consort were dancing. She grabbed a fat rabbit out of one of the cages and held it tight. The man and the woman stopped dancing.   
  
Marie turned the automated music-player off. It was of a strange design – not like anything seen in the Horde. Oppenheimer knelt down before the little girl.   
  
“What have I told you about becoming attached to the test animals, Sagan?”   
  
“Please?” the girl implored. “I already named him. He’s Benny. Also, I wanted to try giving him a robot-leg!”   
  
“Honey…” Maria pleaded. “Remember what happened to Skippy? He didn’t survive very long.”   
  
“Well, that’s ‘cause he was a squirrel and I made the legs too big for him. ‘Sides, I don’t think Benny’s gonna survive long with what Father wants to do.”   
  
“We’re testing the effects of the glowing stones,” Oppenheimer said. “Maybe if he survives you can play with him later.”   
  
Princess Sagan pouted as she put the struggling rabbit back in the cage.   
  
Adora felt a little sick. Catra yawned. Rogelio grunted what they both knew to be his “hungry grunt.”   
  
“This twisted little family – yes, even the little girl – made many chimeras from animals gathered in the mountains for them by hunters or bred within their castle,” Shadow Weaver went on. “What King Oppenheimer wished to do with the glowing stones that Dryl’s hardworking people found in the mines in the mountains was even worse. He had a desire to make powerful weapons – perhaps one that could rival the power of a thousand moons crashing into Etheria. He wished to strike fear into all of his enemies and maybe, would have made Dryl a problem for the Horde had his research not fallen through. Dryl’s miners grew sick after finding the stones. The King and the Crown Princess did many tests on animals – and, at times, upon their own people.”   
  
“How did they even get people to go along with it?” Catra said sarcastically.   
  
“They withheld food,” Shadow Weaver replied, “among other things. The poorest of their people came to the castle to volunteer for experiments in exchange for Oppenheimer and Marie to aid their families. Dryl is in dangerous mountains, you see. Frequent rockslides trap the people there and the border kingdoms were enemies in those times.”   
  
This seemed to satisfy the children, for the time being, at least.   
  
Shadow Weaver continued with her tale. The scene she created shifted to show Marie resting in an opulent bed, her head propped up by pillows while her husband and daughter wore fraught looks at her side.   
  
“Marie grew sick. She developed the same kind of symptoms the miners suffered. No matter what the king did, she grew ever weaker.”   
  
Marie coughed in her bed, leaving flecks of blood upon her chin.   
  
“Mommy?” little Princess Sagan asked.   
  
“You mother shall live, my dear,” Oppenheimer answered.   
  
Shadow Weaver shifted the scene to one of darkness in which a man was being wheeled through the main hall of the castle on a mobile cage. He was chained and did not look like he was volunteering for anything.   
  
“When Marie’s organs began failing, the king sought out the people they owned for…shall we say… spare parts.”   
  
“Please! I beg mercy of you, my lord! I have a family!” the captive pleaded.   
  
Oppenheimer merely gave him a cold look. “So do I.”   
  
Armored guards and robots led him away into room outside of the scene. All of the children at the campfire winced as the sound of a power-saw was heard and the man’s screams were suddenly silenced.   
  
“All of this was to no avail, however,” the sorceress continued. “Princess Marie died.”   
  
The scene shifted to the body of the dead Princess at rest in bed and King Oppenheimer holding his inconsolable daughter. “Sssh…Sagan,” he soothed. “I’m not giving up yet. I’m not giving up yet.”   
  
Adora raised her hand again. “What happened next?” she asked. “I mean… Princess Marie died. There wasn’t anything more they could do!”   
  
“Oh, Adora,” Shadow Weaver cooed. “What did I just tell you about the king and his experiments with spare parts?”   
  
The shadow-play found King Oppenheimer among tombs as rain poured down. He brandished a shovel and a look of determination.   
  
“Princesses are magical, remember?” Shadow Weaver explained. “And so were the glowing stones. Some of the king’s experiments lay not only in killing but in attempts to create life, hence the chimeras in the castle. He knew that the flesh and bones of fallen royals might yet contain enough magic to do something terrible. Where he had failed in preserving his wife’s life with the flesh and blood of the peasantry, he believed he could succeed with…family.”   
  
Catra’s eyes were wide. She scooched closer to Adora. 

“What did he do?” Adora gasped.   
  
Shadow Weaver’s spell showed the tower of the spooky castle again, lit up by a lightning bolt. The pan into the interior showed a body on a sheet laid out upon a table with many tubes and wires feeding into it, struck through glowing crystals of the same type that were previously shown on the alchemy tables.   
  
King Oppenheimer observed proceedings carefully, pulling levers and switches. Electricity coursed through the wires and into the body beneath the sheet. It twitched.  
  
“Yes! Yes!” the king shouted. “Live, my love! Live once again!”   
  
Adora hugged Catra. Rogelio and Kyle hugged each other. Lonnie yawned.   
  
“And live she did,” Shadow Weaver said. “Marie had come back, but she came back wrong.”   
  
In the theater-scene the sheet fell from the body as it rose upright. It was Princess Marie as far as the facial features went, but the rest of her was a patchwork of grisly stitches and mismatched, decayed flesh. She grunted and lunged for her husband.   
  
“My darling Marie?”   
  
“Meat!” the abomination screamed.   
  
“Daddy, what’s wrong?”   
  
Oppenheimer scooped his curious daughter into his arms as he ran through a hallway. He tried to get his former lover lost within the castle.   
  
“Out into the rain he ran,” Shadow Weaver explained. “Out into City Dryl. The creature that had once been Marie attacked the civilians, tearing them to pieces at will, devouring parts of them. It was said that because her spirit never fully joined with her body that she was left hungry, constantly trying to make herself whole.”   
  
Adora was sniffling between her shivers. “That’s…that’s so sad.”   
  
“Hearts were her favorite meal,” Shadow Weaver spoke low.   
  
“What…happened to her?” Kyle ventured, peeking out from behind Rogelio.   
  
“The king devised a trap for his former wife, sealing her up in one of Dryl’s old abandoned mines beneath the castle. It did not stay a trap, though, my children. It eventually became her lair.”   
  
“Her lair?” Adora asked.   
  
“Yes. For you see, King Oppenheimer, and later, Princess Sagan when she inherited the throne, found their people difficult to rule. When rebellions started within the kingdom, they would release the Undead Princess to wreck havoc. When she had eaten her fill, she would retreat to her lair beneath the castle. Why she felt at home there, no one knows. Some say that she retained an urge to be close to her family in her own way.”   
  
“Is she still there?”  
  
“Yes, child. This is the reason why soldiers who patrol around Dryl tend to disappear. The Undead Princess lures them into her lair where she tears out their organs to try to become whole.”   
  
“That wasn’t so scary!” Catra complained.   
  
“Then why is your hair standing on end?” Shadow Weaver asked pointing one long finger toward Catra’s bristled tail. She dissipated her spell.   
  
Adora was hugging her knees. “I hope I’m never stationed there,” she said. “I don’t want to ever go to Dryl.”   
  
Shadow Weaver looked, satisfied, at the shivering young ones around her.   
  
“What story should I tell you next?” 


	3. The Headless Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Princess lost her place as a revolution swept her land. That Princess lost her head. She is cursed to search for a new one for eternity. Shadow Weaver weaves for her children a story of cold revenge.

**Shadow Weaver’s Storytime**  
  
**Chapter 3: The Headless Princess**  
  
  
The Horde children looked up in wonder as snow fell among them. Lonnie and Kyle laughed and tried to catch the flakes. Catra stuck out her tongue as Adora doubled over. She looked so funny! She snorted as she realized the flake she was trying to catch had melted before it had fallen. Lonnie and Kyle stopped their mirth when they realized that it wasn’t really snowing. The snowfall had been made of illusion-magic, which Shadow Weaver dissipated. She was setting another scene.   
  
The sorceress’ hands drew a diagram in the air that became a moving image of a landscape under a fierce blizzard. The wind blew until the snow slowed down and the world within the wound was blinding-white.   
  
“Oooh,” Adora said as she beheld the ice castle. The light of the highest day-moon scattered rainbows off its surface. A crowd was gathered before it.   
  
“This is the origin for the Headless Princess,” Shadow Weaver narrated. “You may be tempted to look away, but do not. This is important for you to learn.”   
  
She wove her hands around the image and it panned over the crowd, all in thick wool coats and furs. In front of them was a stage of ice with a large wooden block set upon it. A tall and beautiful woman with long light blue hair stood in chains before it, flanked by uniformed guards and a large armored woman with ropy arms holding an axe with a blade that appeared to be bigger than any of the children were. Its sharp edge glinted in the moonlight.   
  
“Behold Princess Arctica of the Kingdom of Snows,” Shadow Weaver said. “Two-hundred years ago, she ruled with a frozen fist.”   
  
One of the men at her side pulled the crystal crown from her brow and tossed it into the crowd, which raised a mighty cheer.   
  
“Her line is not the royal line that rules the Kingdom of Snows now, but they are distant relations. Princess Arctica lost her kingdom through terrible mismanagement.”   
  
“What happened?” Kyle ventured to ask.  
  
“Well, Kyle,” Shadow Weaver replied, turning to him, “You shall see. She bankrupted her people with an endless, pointless war against the Selkies – the seal-people who live in their own tribe upon the tundra along the coasts. She ate cake while they scrounged for bread.”   
  
“Don’t we all just eat ration bars and slurries?” Lonnie complained, not getting the point.   
  
“Yes,” Shadow Weaver explained. “You see, here in the Horde, all things are equal. You cadets eat no worse than what I eat. We’ve all even seen Hordak on occasion during his addresses taking only a basic slurry. We are all one in the Horde, remember that.”   
  
Arctica, in the vision, was led to the block. A man pushed her down, forcing her to her knees.   
  
“And the executioner raised the axe,” Shadow Weaver intoned, “giving Princess Arctica swift justice for her crimes against the people.”   
  
All of the Horde-children winced and yelped as they watched the axe fall. Arctica’s head went rolling on the ice-stage. Shadow Weaver dissipated the image.   
  
“Children,” she said “Princesses are dangerous, but so are revolutions. Arctica mismanaged the Kingdom of Snows and her people rebelled. She sowed death and gleaned death in return.”  
  
“I don’t understand,” Lonnie spoke up, “Why didn’t the people just send her into exile? Beast Island, the Crimson Waste, the far tundra… she’d just have died out there, anyway.”  
  
Shadow Weaver turned to her and Adora felt she was smiling wickedly beneath her mask. “Because the people under a Princess’ rule often become as cruel as the Princess, themselves. They were howling outright for blood and wanted to see it with their own eyes. One must be sure with Princesses. Oh, but as you will learn, sometimes even death does not stop them.”   
  
The kids flinched again as Shadow Weaver created another scene. A frostbitten head on a pike with half-chopped hair greeted their collective vision.   
  
“A little too much?” she asked with a laugh. “I have witnessed much worse.” She then wove a vision to show a stone sarcophagus in an icy tomb. “Princess Arctica’s head was put on display while her body was buried separately. This is where the problem began.”  
  
Kyle unseated himself from his place to duck behind Adora of all people as a deep moan came from the theatrical image. Catra’s tail bristled. Adora tensed, almost like she was readying herself to defend them all, even though it was just a story. A mist rose from the coffin in the vision. It coalesced into the form of a headless woman in a dress stained in dark patches.   
  
“And the ghost of the Headless Princess was born,” Shadow Weaver said with an mirth on the edge of her voice. She did enjoy her charges’ fear. “She was bereft without her head. Perhaps this would not have happened if her subjects had laid her with it. As it was, she left her tomb to search for her lost head.”  
  
Catra cautiously raised her hand. “Miss Shadow Weaver,” she ventured, “How could the ghost search without eyes? If her eyes are in her head, how can she see things?”  
  
“And you show that you know nothing of ghosts,” Shadow Weaver answered her, folding her arms. Such idiocy should be expected of you, I suppose. “Ghosts can sense the world around them. They exist on a different plane than we do.”   
  
“That’s weird,” Adora said.  
  
“It is, my child.” She shifted the scene to a small room with beds bearing bodies covered up in blankets. Bloody footprints were on the floor. The sorceress raised her voice subtly as she continued the tale, building drama. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the vision, alert to the blood. “The Headless Princess wandered, attempting to replace her head. She destroyed any peasant in her former kingdom she came across. On warmer nights in the Kingdom of Snows when the air was thick and mists rose up from the ground, she moved among the fog and entered houses while the people in them were asleep.”   
  
Shadow Weaver chose to dissolve the vision in favor of raising her hands in a gesture like she was brandishing a huge weapon. “With a spectral battleaxe of the same kind she was executed with, she chopped off the heads of innocents as they dreamt!”   
  
Adora winced and even Rogelio shifted with one of his bestial noises.   
  
“H-h-how’d she get the axe?” Kyle asked.   
  
“Her own sense of revenge conjured it,” Shadow Weaver explained, “for she was cursed to be bound to the weapon that had killed her, just as she was bound forever to seek her head.”   
  
The children were all huddled together now, and rapt.   
  
“I am feeling generous tonight,” Shadow Weaver intoned, “So I shall spare you the worst of the images. Suffice to say that the Headless Princess took up the heads of her victims – who, unlike a Princess – were not possessed of the right sort of magic to be bound howling to this world. She would carry them around and try to put them on, though none seemed to fit her. Eventually, she bound them to the saddle of a great beast she rode through the icy wastes.”   
  
“A beast?” Adora asked.   
  
“A four-footed monster that breathed and spat ice and light,” Shadow Weaver explained as she conjured an image of a skeletal ungulate. (Adora would learn later that this image was of the bones of a horse, but her teacher chose not to tell her or anyone about horses at the time). Shrunken heads dangled off a furry saddle.   
  
“The saddle on her beast was made of CAT SKIN!” She shouted at Catra.   
  
Catra shrank behind Rogelio as Shadow Weaver laughed deep and dark. “It is told that the people of the northern forests bordering the Kingdom of Snows carve gourds with false faces and light them every year when the trees wither and die, when the horrible spirit passes through their lands. They leave them as offerings to the Headless Princess – to trick her into taking them instead of their heads. Oh, but children, that does not stop her long. She merely takes these lanterns to light her way to her next victims. She is not confined to the Kingdom of Snows, either. This ghost has been sighted all over Etheria.”   
  
Shadow Weaver formed her fingers into claws and waggled them at the huddled children. “Some even say she’s come to the Fright Zone now and again. You know how some of our brave soldiers go missing at the edges of the territory?”   
  
“Like the ones who patrol Dryl who are called away by the Undead Princess?” Adora asked, still frightened by the previous story of a stitched up, half-living corpse.   
  
“Yes,” she answered. “And you know what, little one? It is said that because she had long, light-colored locks that she most prefers to hunt those with the same. Her hair was as blue as frost, but she takes the heads of elderly folks with white manes and especially….oh… especially pretty light blondes.”   
  
Adora shivered. Catra cuddled up next to her.   
  
Shadow Weaver made another motion with her hands and arms. “Be careful when you sleep beyond your barracks, especially in weather that is misty and cold, for on one foggy night when you least expect it, when you’re snug in your sleeping roll, she may just dismount her steed and creep up upon you, and then… then…” She swung her arms theatrically, “CHOP! CHOP! CHOP!”   
  
Adora screamed. 


	4. The Weeping Princess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You know she is near by the sound of her weeping. A tale of betrayal.

**Shadow Weaver’s Storytime  
  
  
  
Chapter 4: The Weeping Princess  
  
**  
  
  
“It is growing late,” Shadow Weaver intoned. “You should take your rest.”   
  
“But we aren’t tired!” Lonnie protested.   
  
“I’m not,” Kyle added, hugging his arms around his knees with a shiver. “I don’t think I can sleep now!”   
  
“One more story couldn’t hurt.” Shadow Weaver nodded. She then leaned uncomfortably close to Adora and Catra. “Unless it does!”   
  
Adora gave an exaggerated yawn. “We’ll sleep! We’ll sleep!” she insisted.   
  
“No,” their guardian said, “You should hear this one. It is a tale of best friends and betrayal.” She wove a spell between her fingertips, creating a miniature theater again.   
  
The scene opened upon a springtime forest.   
  
“You can’t catch me!” sang a youthful voice.   
  
“Hahaha, yes I can!”   
  
A young deer-woman burst out of a swath of bushes and tackled a standard human with pearl-white hair that shone like the moons. They rolled over each other in the grass and laughed.   
  
Adora stared up at the moving images, entranced by the girl with the white hair. Catra wrinkled her nose at the deer-woman.   
  
“These were Princess Luxia and Princess Rosa,” Shadow Weaver narrated. “Princess Luxia was of Bright Moon and Rosa of Plumeria.”   
  
“Wait,” Lonnie said, raising a hand. “Isn’t Bright Moon ruled by that immortal Princess?”   
  
“Queen,” Shadow Weaver corrected, nodding to the girl beside her. “For she is an elder and a mother, but she did not always have hold over the Moonstone.”   
  
She wove more scenes of the two ancient Princesses. “Luxia kept the Moonstone and Rosa the Heart Blossom and despite their respective bonds to their lands and royals, they did not guard their hearts.”   
  
“Guard their hearts? What is that supposed to mean?” Kyle ventured. “Yipe!” He moved closer to Rogelio when their mentor turned to him.   
  
“A given Runestone ruler is meant to have loyalty to their land and to their subjects. Luxia and Rosa started life as childhood friends, frolicking in the Whispering Woods, heedless of their peoples’ wishes. Remember what I’ve told you previously about Princesses, children. They are selfish creatures, taking from their subjects while only thinking about themselves. These two were no different. They were ready to cast off their responsibilities to sate their own appetites.”   
  
Adora stared at the ghost-figures in the vision laughing and dancing with each other. Rose conjured a flower-crown for Luxia and Luxia, in turn, hung moss from Rosa’s antlers. Rosa gave her a peck on the cheek. “They were in love!” Adora declared.   
  
“Yes,” Shadow Weaver continued. “Even though being together meant that one would have to leave their kingdom for the other to be an official consort, leaving their people leaderless and lost.”   
  
“I don’t see anything wrong with that…” the blonde ventured, “Being in love, I mean.”   
  
“This is because you are a child,” Shadow Weaver grumbled. “The magic of the Runestones can be quite unstable without a guide. While I do think that Princesses born to the role are poor guides, in the absence of a skilled sorcerer, they can be worse if left alone. They may even be better off destroyed. The Black Garnet has me as its skilled caretaker. If it were merely left alone…why… I don’t know what would happen to it.”   
  
The vision shifted as Shadow Weaver gesticulated. The principal characters in the story appeared to be slightly older.   
  
“Rosa! Rosa!” Luxia said as she ran across the meadow to greet her girlfriend. “I have wonderful news!”   
  
“What is it, pray tell, my darling?” the deer-woman replied.   
  
“I have met soldiers! And an amazing general!” Luxia excitedly said. “He is a very wise leader of a land not very far from here, a new kingdom built upon the remains of old Scorpion Hill! The Scorpion-Folk discovered a better form of government!”   
  
“Say what?” Rosa replied with a cock of her head and a flick of her ear.   
  
“Where do you think I’ve spent the last month? I’ve been given a tour and involved in negotiations!”   
  
“You aren’t talking about the Fright Zone and the Horde, are you?”   
  
“Why, yes I am! The people there live in equality and in order! Everything there is based on merit! Even their general, Hordak, built the empire from the ground-up!” Luxia danced around, teleporting here and there in bursts of light. “No one fears magical powers there – they do not even matter!”   
  
“You are confusing me.”   
  
Luxia took Rosa by the shoulders. “There is nothing to be confused about! I do think the people of Bright Moon might be better off if I gave the lands to the Horde. Hordak will bring them order and his marvelous technology, and… well, I can be free to marry you and live in Plumeria!” 

Rosa held up one hand. “Wait; just hang on a minute here! You can’t give everything up to the Horde! Where would that put you as a Princess? You are telling me that you no longer want to rule? To lord over your people? To inspire fear and awe in them with your powers?”   
  
“I don’t think they need me anymore…” Luxia said. “I don’t think anyone needs the old monarchies anymore. Just imagine! A world based on merit and order! Plumeria could join, too! We’ll be a part of something greater than ourselves! Something stronger! Something that benefits the whole instead of just us!”   
  
Rosa’s ears drooped in contemplation. “I shall think upon it,” she said.   
  
“We never had Bright Moon,” Kyle said. Rogelio rumbled beside him.   
  
“Of course we did not,” Shadow Weaver explained, “Because of some poor decisions.”   
  
She wove her images again. Luxia and Rosa were playing tag in the forest again. In among a grove of trees, Rosa sighed, regarding her lover.   
  
“I am sorry, Luxia,” she said.   
  
“For what?”   
  
“For what I am about to do.”   
  
The Plumerian Princess called upon her plant-based powers and sang to the trees of the Whispering Woods.   
  
“What? What’s happening?!” Luxia cried as trees suddenly grew up around her, their branches entwining, caging her in a small area.   
  
“I’ve thought about it,” Rosa confessed, “The Horde, I mean. I cannot join them and you cannot, either. I am protecting Bright Moon as well as Plumeria. I hope one day that you will understand.”   
  
“No! Wait!”   
  
Rosa walked away from the cage of trees as Luxia thrust her hand between the branches, reaching for her.   
  
“What happened next?” The children spoke as one, looking up at Shadow Weaver in awe.   
  
“Heh, heh,” the sorceress chuckled. “Well, Rosa left, back to her kingdom. The trees eventually parted.”   
  
She wove an image of Luxia, her hair lighted by the moons, wandering cold and alone in the nighttime woods.   
  
“What the erstwhile Princess of Plumeria did to the woods has an effect to this day. The Whispering Woods used to be a lovely, normal forest, but Rosa’s terrible magic coaxed it into becoming a deathtrap. You know how the forest turns and shifts? Yes… she did that – all to keep her friend from making the wisest of decisions.”   
  
The image shifted of Luxia sitting down on a fallen log and weeping.   
  
The Horde kids jumped back as one when Shadow Weaver brought forth images of her becoming emaciated and suddenly turning into a pile of bones. The bones were wrapped in vines and drawn into the earth, reclaimed by the forest. A spectral image remained of Luxia, still crying.   
  
“She weeps to this day, terrified, sad and lost. She is also angry… very angry.”   
  
“If she couldn’t rule…why does Bright Moon still have Princesses?” Catra asked.   
  
“A stupid question!” Shadow Weaver shot. “A new keeper of the Runestone appeared – an illegitimate queen from a mountaintop area far away called Mizar. You know her as Queen Angella. She took over the land and claimed it as her own, swooping in like a vulture as soon as Luxia was lost. You must fear fighting her in the future, for she is grim and terrible.”   
  
“M…more terrible than ghosts?” Adora asked.   
  
“Oh, much more, child. If Princess-ghosts are wicked, immortal beings are much worse.”   
  
“So, do we have to fear this…Luxia or whatever?” Lonnie sarcastically asked.   
  
“Yes,” Shadow Weaver answered. “She cries piteously to this day. When she approaches, you can hear the sound of her weeping growing ever louder as she draws closer – and closer! She seeks revenge upon the one who betrayed her, but as a ghost, you see, she has gone quite mad and sees all the living as Rosa. She has done any number of grisly things to Horde soldiers and to the common people alike. It is said that she often possesses people’s bodies, making them harm themselves, or that she’ll lure you on a path, mesmerizing you, making you think that you have found a path out of the forest only to get you lost there, like her….FOREVER!”   
  
The children yelped. Even Rogelio grunted.   
  
“Now, children, I shall turn in. I suggest you do the same. We have a big day tomorrow. Goodnight.”   
  
Shadow Weaver retreated into the shadows to recline upon her bedroll. Each of the squadron-children carefully lay down on theirs. Catra and Adora shivered next to each other.   
  
“Do you think any of those stories were true?” Adora asked with chattering teeth.   
  
“Nah…she’s just messing with us,” said Catra. Her own shivers and distress-purring, however, told Adora that, despite her bravado, she was afraid, too. Somehow, it was good company. They shivered together until they both fell asleep. 


	5. Haunted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Childhood nightmares passed into hard realities. 
> 
> Adora's reflects, has guilt-induced dreams and starts moving on.

**Shadow Weaver’s Storytime  
  
  
Chapter 5: Haunted**  
  
  
  
Childhood nightmares had passed into hard realities. After Adora had defected from the Horde and become a fixture in Bright Moon, the camping trips of her youth became a hazy memory. She still recalled them for the skills she had learned from them – tracking, scavenging and sheltering outdoors, but now she was a non-hostile in the once-hostile territories.   
  
She’d been to all of the places that the undead were said to haunt. She’d been to Dryl and hadn’t encountered the Undead Princess or her lair. Malfunctioning homicidal robots had presented their own dangers and were quite enough. She’d been to the Kingdom of Snows and thoughts of encountering the Headless Princess were the last thing on her mind. The Whispering Woods held no weeping save her own when she was near the Citadel and everything she was expected to be felt just so hard.   
  
If pressed to admit it, she would say that she found Queen Angella intimidating, however. She was a stately woman with a presence of power and the largest target of Horde propaganda (those false first impressions were difficult to shake), but those were not the sole reasons that Adora secretly found her unnerving. The very fact that she was immortal (not a fairy tale, but something confirmed by Glimmer) didn’t sit well in Adora’s mind. Soldiers of the Horde hoped to die honorably on the battlefield, or perhaps, if they survived their youth, to take service as a bureaucrat, regaling the young with war stories until, they, too, lay down for the last time and went out with honor. There was supposed to be no life after that, no twisted existence as a ghost and no immortality save for one’s name.   
  
Adora had fully expected that when she died, a black curtain would fall for her and it would be like sleep. She had the instinctual fear of it, but the idea also struck her as peaceful. To meet someone who was ageless and who expected to continue on, watching time’s stream never to rest sent a shudder through her – as one might have when encountering something fundamentally unnatural. It was not known how her new best friend, Glimmer, would fare in this department as a half-mortal. It was thought likely that Glimmer could live for centuries. Adora tried not to think about it much.   
  
A thought that kept Adora up late at night occasionally was the worry that now that she had found the Sword of Protection and had become a channel for She-Ra that she might become a ghost someday. She had become a Princess – of a sort. She had no lands or rulership to call her own, but she was now magically-empowered. She wondered it if meant that her spirit was bound to the physical realm in some way or to the sword and thus to any future takers of the “She-Ra” mantle. She wondered if she’d be slated to watch time and people pass, sharing the fate of Angella, the possible fate of Glimmer, and the fate of the twisted souls in Shadow Weaver’s old stories. 

Largely, she dismissed those fears, putting them to the back of her mind. In fact, there were a few times that Adora found herself somewhat hoping that ghosts were real. She liked to imagine King Micah watching over Angella and Glimmer in some invisible and inaudible, but benevolent way. She had never known him, but could feel how much they missed him in the very air of the castle. From her conversations with Madame Razz and Light Hope, she wished she could speak with the ancestral Mara just to understand why she had done what she had done, to solve the mystery of what She-Ra was supposed to be. These little wishes weren’t so strange, the former Horde soldier decided. After all, she regularly spoke with a sapient alicorn. Everyone in Bright Moon, although they were a people surrounded by magic, took Swift Wind to be a mythic beast. Only Angella seemed to be unfazed by him, perhaps because she had seen stranger things in her indefinite lifespan.   
  
Life went on and the ghost stories of Adora’s childhood were merely an afterthought for a long time. She couldn’t say that she really believed in ghosts, but old ideas shook hard. It was like how she kept a dagger under her pillow – an old Hordesman habit to be prepared for enemy-attack at a moment’s notice – regardless of the relative peace and safety of Bright Moon.   
  
Of course the “Princess-ghosts” idea was nonsense, she told herself. The Princesses were just regular people – well, they were people with magical powers, but generally amiable and fairly well – normal - if she dared use the term. She wouldn’t use that term upon second-thought, but they weren’t the monsters from the Force Captains’ speeches and the training videos.   
  
The thought of spirits and ghouls unexpectedly hit Adora full-force one night soon after the Battle of Bright Moon.   
  
In the week after their rout of the Horde, her back remained sore and she was spending a lot of time making sure Glimmer was alright. The latter Princess seemed to have made a full recovery from the illness that Shadow Weaver had inflicted upon her. The Princess Alliance was rebuilding the damage done and as they did so, they took an assessment of their victories…and their losses.   
  
They’d held a small memorial service for Entrapta. While it was up to Dryl to hold a state-ceremony according to the customs of its people and to decide a line of succession, the Princesses held their own private Alliance-ceremony in one of Bright Moon’s gardens. The last-known photograph of Entrapta was projected from a recording-device as a hologram onto an open area. It was an image of her from the Princess Prom.   
  
Sometime before all of the chaos, the Alliance had managed to rope her into taking a group-picture with them that Sea Hawk had held onto because he’d managed to loop an arm around an annoyed Mermista right when the photographer had snapped the shot. The inventor-Princess stood out in her casual attire among all of the formal wear. She was down in front, sitting coyly on a seat made from her hair in front of Bow and Perfuma, with an uneasy-looking Glimmer and distracted Adora off to one side and the aforementioned Sea Hawk wearing a huge grin next to Mermista, who was wearing a scowl on the other side. Bow zoomed the shot in onto her face. Sticks of incense were lit before the image and Perfuma produced many colorful flowers for everyone to place before it. 

Everyone took turns standing up and speaking about Entrapta. They hadn’t known her for long, but she had made an impact. Bow had spoken at most length, being a fan of her invention-designs, an admirer from-afar before he’d met her. Perfuma had wept the most. Frosta had the least to say, since she had not been a part of the Alliance until recently and hadn’t interacted with her except to wonder why the Princess of Dryl had shown up to the event without formal-wear. Adora had said what she could, biting her lip when she thought of how she had lead the tragic rescue-mission. She didn’t speak of that, not wanting to make the service about her when the focus was to be on Entrapta’s memory. She kept her speech simple, vowing to not let her death be in vain.   
  
Adora was bone-tired when she’d gotten to bed the night after the service. She awoke with a start to a visitor in her room. The short figure was translucent and wreathed in blue and purple flames. They greeted her with a wide and friendly grin and a wave of a hand-shaped hair-tail.   
  
“Oh, hi, Adora!”   
  
“En-Entrapta?!” Adora gasped, scrambling back in her bed. She looked around herself frantically. Bow and Glimmer were not there. No…she was beginning to sleep alone now. Her big room felt like a cavern.   
  
She blinked. The ghost remained. Adora could hear her heart pounding in her head. She balled up her blanket in her hands and fought the urge to reach for her dagger.   
  
“There’s no such thing as Princess-ghosts…” she said to herself. “Remember what Catra said… Shadow Weaver was just messing with us. There’s no such thing…”  
  
“Adora, are you trying to ignore me?”   
  
Adora relented. She stared at the figure in the foxfire, ready to accept this apparition as a part of her new reality.   
  
“Entrapta…what are you doing here?”   
  
The spectral Entrapta curled the end of one of her ponytails under her chin. “What was I doing here?” she mused. The late Princess of Dryl quickly turned back to Adora with the biggest, most cheerful smile she’d ever seen. “Oh, right! I’m here to drag you to the Lake of Fire!”   
  
“Wait? What?”   
  
Adora found an ethereal ponytail whipped out and wrapped around her left wrist. It was as cold as ice – and burning. She felt a physical tug. “No! No!” she protested. “Why are you doing this?”   
  
“Isn’t it obvious?” Entrapta said in a chipper tone, “Oversights in your leadership got me killed!”   
  
“No…I never meant! You went back for that robot of yours! That’s what the others told me!”   
  
“You were in charge of the mission!” Entrapta’s ghostly eyes were glowing a deep red now. Her friendly smile quickly turned into an angry grimace. Her voice deepened. “You got me killed in such a way that my body couldn’t even be donated to science!”   
  
“Entrapta, I’m so sorry!”   
  
Translucent flames roared up all around Adora as she felt herself being pulled toward the glowing specter.   
  
“I’m a vengeful spirit now! There is no rest for you or for me! And I’ve got ya!”   
  
Adora awoke with a start. Her heart thumped and her room was empty. Cold sweat slicked her skin. She looked all around the darkened chamber. The morning moon was rising. Adora got up and walked around. She checked the closet and the bathroom. She even checked the drawers. There were no signs of haunting.   
  
She breathed no word of the dream to anyone.   
  
She’d had a few more unpleasant dreams in the nights after that. They tended to take on more mundane forms – like walking in on Entrapta among the other Princesses in the War Room before she woke up groggy and realized she wasn’t going to be seeing her, or asking her and Bow about their latest counter-Horde technology project only to, again, realize she was gone. One of the dreams involved Entrapta sitting on the edge of her bed, surrounded by foxfires, not particularly vengeful, rattling on about how fascinating the experience of being a ghost was.   
  
Then there was the one where she was forced to watch Entrapta burn alive in the purge-chamber, torched to bone before she could even scream, agony in her eyes. Adora had awakened trembling from that one and had immediately run to the lavatory to vomit violently.   
  
Even the most peaceful of the dreams disturbed Adora and convinced some superstitious part inside her heart that she was being followed by a vengeful ghost – maybe not an undead being that lured Horde soldiers into a cave or down a forest path, or one that killed the unwary, leaving bloody footprints behind, but one that was worse – one that wanted to drive her insane.   
  
Adora had an idea while having dessert after dinner with Queen Angella, Glimmer and Bow. They had tiny scones – a specialty of the new kitchen staffers (and sometimes war-camp cooks) they’d gained recently. Adora asked for an extra, claiming that they were so little that she had room in her stomach for more – a midnight snack to take up to her room. Once she got there, she secured the doorway.   
  
“Alright… I feel….really silly for this…” she said as she placed miniature scone on a windowsill and found a candle to light beside it. She grabbed a bottle of soda she’d pocketed from the kitchen and placed it on the sill next to the dessert. “En-Entrapta… if you’re out there? I have a peace-offering, okay? H-here.”   
  
Every evening that she bothered to grab an extra tiny dessert or request the kitchen make her some tiny cupcake or fruit tart as a “midnight snack” to leave upon the windowsill was an evening that Adora was free from nightmares.   
  
It was obvious that the food remained the next day, but Adora thought that maybe Entrapta had come by to consume their flavors and upon being appeased, left her alone. When morning came, if the local birds hadn’t gotten to the dessert first, she’d tip it over the windowsill into the forest below and gently pour out the fizzy drink. She felt silly, but the bad dreams were gone and with that, she could focus on her training. She had to get strong enough to keep any of her remaining friends from being hurt. Perhaps this ritual was foolish, but it made her feel safe and gave her a small sense of peace.   
  
Her superstition remained a closely-guarded secret. She was certain that Glimmer would find out about it eventually, teleporting in to check on her at some inopportune time, forcing her to explain.   
  
As it happened, she never did, and Adora never had to explain herself.   
  
The news that Entrapta was still alive came as an utter shock to her later. Bow had figured it out from an advanced Horde robot he’d dissected. Its internals had all of the signature marks of an Entrapta-design, an integration of a First Ones tech crystal as a power-source that none of the other Etherian Makers had ever managed to accomplish (not even the ones that closely studied Entrapta’s work). Bow and Glimmer had embarked upon an ill-fated independent rescue-mission and confirmed contact with her via communication-pad and that she had happily defected to the Horde for the sake of the use of their technology. 

Adora didn’t know which was worse… the idea of a vengeful spirit or the idea that a friend had betrayed them with a sense of pure apathy. She was alive, at least. Adora felt like Shadow Weaver must have gotten to her and magically brainwashed her somehow, but from the report that Bow and Glimmer gave, it did not seem the case. “She seemed normal,” Glimmer had said, “Entrapta-normal, but still…”   
  
They decided that they’d find a way to get her back, but there were more pressing matters of the war at-hand in the meantime.   
  
The day that the Best Friend Squad was discussing this was the day the old ghost stories flooded back. They were on a mission to a “haunted” village and the tales came pouring forth. Adora recognized a thread in them as she shared them with her friends.   
  
Princesses. Always Princesses.  
  
Adora could pinpoint when the light went on in her brain over that.   
  
The group, indeed, found something awry in the small village, but it turned out to be ancient technology – old, distorted holograms from a forgotten age.   
  
In the ensuing days, Adora occasionally still dreamed about Entrapta. The Dryllian would ask why she was left behind, why the Alliance thought so little of her – why they didn’t go back for a body or ashes. Something was tactically off about that, perhaps, but the need for the living to escape quickly at the time had been pressing. Adora would shake herself awake, full of guilt, but perhaps not as much as before. As Glimmer had said, the scientist was making her own decisions. Adora didn’t do the ritual of leaving food on the windowsill anymore.   
  
She grew more relaxed around Queen Angella. It was easy to forget about the old propaganda and even the strange agelessness when Adora found herself practically adopted. 

The tale that she would recall most often was the one about the Weeping Princess… she couldn’t help but mull over “one friend betraying the other for the sake of what they thought was right.” She’d heard that tale from a Horde perspective. She’d remember that and think of Catra. Adora told herself that she was doing the right thing, that her defection had been the correct decision, but she couldn’t help but mull over what it must seem like from a different point of view.   
  
Moving forward, Adora would perhaps always be a little haunted by her upbringing, but for now, she was learning to become free. 

________________________  
  
 **END.**


End file.
